Here are a few naked Bible helping us about our guidebook.

Here was Nick's new Negative Bible Podcast.

Sports Podcast, www.NegativeBibleBlog.com

Welcome back to the Negative Bible Podcast.

In the last podcast episode, we continued our series on studying the Bible in a way that amounts to more than reading.

By taking a look at the legal genre in Old Testament books, again, a genre is a type of literature, and knowing what type of literature you're in helps with interpretation.

Now today we're going to focus on another genre, military annals or military accounts.

I think the best way of illustrating how this genre can matter for interpretation is to begin with a problem that it solves, one that biblical scholars have grappled with for centuries in fact.

Specifically, I'm speaking of the problem of the unrealistic large numbers in the Exodus and wilderness journey.

Now in case you aren't familiar with this famous biblical problem, let me explain.

In the census following the Exodus from Egypt in Numbers chapter 1 specifically verse 46, the number of Israelite males older than 20 years of age is put at 603,550, which is slightly more than the second census taken later in the book of Numbers in chapter 26, which gives that total at 601,730.

Now these figures imply that the total population of the fledgling nation of Israel was somewhere between 2 and 3 million people.

Those figures are very difficult to reconcile with the geography of Canaan and the archaeological record, and frankly other biblical statements about the Israelites on the way to Canaan after the Exodus.

Now when what follows I'll illustrate the problem from the biblical text and mention a commonly proposed solution, but then I'll introduce you to what I think is the best solution, one that derives from the type of literature we're dealing with in the Exodus and Conquest narratives.

Illustrating the problem well several passages illustrate the conundrums that are created by taking these large numbers at face value.

For instance, Deuteronomy 7 1 through 7 presents Israel as quote, the least numerous, the least numerous nation in Canaan at the time of the Conquest.

It mentions that there are seven other nations that were larger.

Now if we take 2 to 3 million as the population of Israel, the total population of all eight nations combined would have had to range from anywhere from 16 to 24 million people, roughly the 2010 population of Florida or Texas respectively.

The size of Canaan however is closer to that of New Jersey than either of those states. That presents a problem.

Archaeological evidence does not indicate that enough cities and towns existed to support a population of this size. To be really blunt about it it's nowhere close to accommodating that number of people.

If you took every settlement, every village that's known in Canaan, you just can't get to enough settlements and of course enough settlements that are big enough to accommodate 16 to 24 million people. It's an impossibility.

A second example also helps put the problem in a perspective. The Israelites left Egypt with, according to Exodus 1237, about 600,000 men on foot besides women and children. That's a quote.

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